As promised in my Introduction to Yarold’s Link Exchange, here are two tools that has made it possible for me to click hundreds of links a day with very little time invested. Both of these are add-ons for Firefox 3.0. Not sure what there might be for IE, but these two tools will make it well worth your time.

First, we have the Firefox add on Flashblock.

Description from the site:

Flashblock is an extension for the Mozilla, Firefox, and Netscape browsers that takes a pessimistic approach to dealing with Macromedia Flash content on a webpage and blocks ALL Flash content from loading. It then leaves placeholders on the webpage that allow you to click to download and then view the Flash content.

Why is this helpful? Because many of the links you’ll be opening at Yarold’s (MyMiniCity in particular) are flash intensive. I found these sites really choked up my computer when I tried to open multiple links all at once… mostly because they all tried to open many instances of Flash components. This add-on will allow you to load the page and earn your credits without the flash slowing you down… thus allowing you to open more pages at once.

Which leads me to the next add-on…

Snap Links Plus for Firefox 3.0.

This is invaluable for opening many links at once in separate tabs. After you install it, when you click and hold the right mouse button, a green box will appear. If you drag that box over links, then release the button, it will open all of those links in separate tabs. You can probably configure it to do other things if you want, but that’s the default.

This works fantastic for Yarold’s where all the links are in a straight line down the page. Simply click, drag and release… and all the links will pop open for you at once! Wait a little while for them to load, follow whatever instructions are on the site to give that gamer credit, then close the page and snap link on down the list again!

The final trick I have for making navigation between tabs in Firefox quick is this:

Ctrl+W will close a Firefox tab when you’re done with it. This saves you time from mousing up to click the tiny red “x” on the tab.

Ctrl+Tab will move to the next Firefox tab without closing it. Good for skipping over the tabs that require more time to load and moving on to the next.

For those with fancy mice that allow programmable buttons, you can set up your extra buttons to these keystrokes. That’s what I’ve done.

Hope this helps — happy clicking!

And if you have any other add ons or tips that help to make things faster, feel free to post a reply. I’m always glad to learn about more!